Horizons: Exploring the Universe (High School Edition)

Text-specific "Socratic" tutorials authored by Mike Seeds are consistent with the pedagogy and overall approach of the Seeds/Backman texts.

Mike Seeds' and Dana Backman's conversational and student-friendly writing style, places an emphasis on helping students acquire an understanding of the universe over rote memorization of basic facts.

Chapter opener "Guideposts" connect previous and future chapters to the material the students are about to read, highlighting "important questions" within that chapter to help motivate students to read.

"Guided Discovery Figures" lead students through several frames of art to demonstrate processes that occur over time, providing brief guiding comments as though the authors were explaining each frame to the student themselves.

"Concept art spreads" combine several ideas over two pages, providing an opportunity for students to process information visually and synthesize individual understanding.

Introductions to the Concept Art spreads alert students that there are a certain number of points and new terms to look for in both the introduction and in the art spreads themselves.

Every chapter has been reviewed and updated with new discoveries and images.

The lunar and solar eclipse tables in Chapter 3 have been updated to include eclipses through the year 2024.

The Mars retrograde loop figure in Chapter 4 is updated to 2018.

New and planned observatory facilities, including the Thirty Meter Telescope, are featured in Chapter 5 (“Light and Telescopes”).

Solar cycle plots in Chapter 7 (“The Sun”) have been updated to 2016, and implications of the late start and weak maximum of the most recent solar activity cycle are discussed.

Chapter 11 (“Neutron Stars and Black Holes”) includes a description of the discovery of gravity waves from distant black hole mergers by the LIGO interferometer.

Chapter 12 (“The Milky Way Galaxy”) includes a new image of the galaxy’s circumnuclear ring orbiting a central supermassive black hole, obtained by an infrared camera onboard NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA).

Chapter 14 (“Modern Cosmology”) contains a discussion of the claimed detection of cosmological gravity waves in 2014 and subsequent careful reanalysis of the data by several research teams, as an object lesson in the care that professional scientists take to check their results and avoid wishful thinking.

Chapter 15 (“Origin of the Solar System and Extrasolar Planets”) has been updated with new information regarding the wide and wonderful variety of extrasolar planets discovered and studied by the Kepler and Spitzer space telescopes plus ground-based research programs.

Chapter 17 (“Mercury, Venus, and Mars”), Chapter 18 (“The Outer Solar System”), and Chapter 19 (“Meteorites, Asteroids, and Comets”) are updated with new findings and images regarding Mercury, Mars, Ceres, Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, and Pluto from the MESSENGER, Curiosity, Dawn, Rosetta-Philae, and New Horizons space missions, respectively.